What do they know about love?

I was looking at my life and found
that it's full of opinions burdened unto me.
By my father and my father's father and our past
not my present.
Symbol for our thoughts: the blank-faced stare of the train passenger.
Stare into nothingness, other people, whose minds are filled with nothingness.
When meaning is defined recursively by meaninglessness
we have ideas foisted upon us
and they aren't real.
I'm fucking overwhelmed!

I take issue with calling it a sign of hope
As dwindling hope cannot be hopeful.
"Full" cannot be diminishing unless the expectations are.
I hunger for the time when rebellion was cool.
i want to be too cool for school.
i hunger for a hunger to be aroused in me that forces its way to a boil and blows the top off everything
But the pot is firmly placed on the back burner of a fast food chain.

What do they know about love?
Are my emotions transcending all?
Have I found the bridge over the drivel of everyday banality?
i feel it when I'm with her and when I'm away I long for it, but my logic tells me that love is simpler than complexities of emotions make it out to be.
It is simply a lust, a drive, driven by the evolutionary need to procreate with a partner that will be amply suited to oneself to help rear a successful procreation.
Science makes everything sound painful
but love is more to me and her
because we know where science has no evidence.
we know that science can't understand love because even the people in love can't.
We know why love exists, but nothing can make sense of that something beyond the lust, the drive, the evolutionary need.
Much like the soul's all-encompassing mystery, we can't know the answers until we know where it starts and love does not start in one moment.
thought starts in one place, but branches in all directions.
Love is the opposite of thought

Mom

"Son, why won't you accept Jesus into your heart?"
"Mom, I do accept Jesus' teachings I just don't go to church because I don't like--"
"Son, God will accept you back. It's not too late!"
"Not for me at least." I mumble.
When I started listening to rock music my mom started listening to Christian rock. When I came into her house today the song "Jesus is Just Alright With Me" was playing. I love this song, but not for itself. I used to sing this song in the halls in high school. It has a damn good groove and the man can sing, but I love the song because of the reaction it elicited. No one ever joined in or reacted in a way that indicated that I wasn't acting like a raving maniac by rubbing my religion in everyone with the power of hearing's faces.
"Son, one day you'll understand that your mom was right. I hope that day is soon."
My mother wears a rosary like a necklace now. Even I know that this is wrong. Rosaries are private prayer tools, not accessories that flaunt a person's apparently constant readiness to burst into prayer. I would respect someone that filled with the spirit of anything to the point where they would spontaneously break into fits of it.
"Mom?"
"Yes son?"
"What's for dinner?" I say into my hands. I'm sitting with both fists clenched, pressing my knuckles together. All I want is to be with the mother I knew before she caught religion, the mother I knew before my father left. Losing passion has a funny way of forcing people into things. My mother's passion was not loving my father, but hating him. All emotions are defined recursively.
My mother sighs. "Meatloaf, your favorite."
"Excellent. I'm starving."
My mother is wearied after her spiel about the Lord. She has given up for the night.

We sit down at the dinner table and say grace because I don't fight tradition. The meatloaf is excellent as always. I take the heels of the loaf because they're burned a little more and the crispiness helps me forget that I'm eating meat shaped like bread. It's tasty anyway, but molded meat will always be dubious to me.
"How is your work going?"
"Well, I'm starting to find a little following."
"People like what you write?"
I sigh at this passive aggression. "Yes mother people enjoy the words I write."
We sit in silence for a while.
"Have you talked to your father lately?" My mother asks because she has nothing else to inquire about.
"I talked to him yesterday." I say to my meatloaf not wanting to see her reaction.
"Oh." My mother says to her meatloaf.
After a while she breaks the discomfort with "You know you look so much like him."
"Mom I told you I don't like when you compare us." I say, slightly more agitated than I want, which only reminds me of his temper.
"I'm sorry. It's just surprising is all."
"Mom please. I don't want to talk about it." My fists are firmly holding my silverware and my voice is annunciating like his used to. I hate how right she is. I hate that I learned to hate this way from him.

Later we sit and watch television and my mother knits. Presumably another blanket for the homeless shelter. When people get as into religion as she is they do the good and suffer the bad, the pain of the filler in their heads. Wheel of Fortune is on and Vanna is as ageless as ever.
"Mom am I like dad?" I want her to say no.
"Well, you are in many ways. Sometimes you sound just like him and sometimes you sound like the opposite of him." She says to her yarn.
"Mom i don't want to be dad. Why do people become their parents?" I say, wondering aloud
"I don't know, son." my mother says sighing.
"I feel like I can't have any original thoughts because I think like him. I talk like him. I guess only the people that are complete departures from their parents are original."
"Oh that's what I wanted to tell you!" She has perked up. "Your sister has decided to join my prayer group! Isn't that lovely? You know there are lots of pretty girls that come to these." She is getting into another angle of her pitch.
"Mom wasn't your mother an old religious nut too?"
She slaps me hard and her face has hardened. The stare of a nun is broken by the sobs of an old woman who is confused. I hold her when she falls into my arms. I tell her that it's okay and everything is fine. She says she still loves Jesus, but she's just so sad and nothing is helping. I tell her that she is bored, she needs something to do.
"I could start playing tennis again. They have leagues for old ladies like me. I could get my friends to join too."
"There you go mom! That sounds great. I have to get on now. I love you." I kiss her and go to the door.
"Son? Will I see you at mass tomorrow morning?" She asks me hopefully.
I decide to give it another try.
"Sure, mom. I'll be there."
She's happy and I'm dreading the next morning. Every kind of change comes with some fear though. Hell, maybe I'll start believing.
As I walk out I'm engulfed in the shadow of my mother's house. I look to her window and see her praying at her window. I won't be attending mass tomorrow.

Basement

He sits in his basement plucking away at a guitar, running the few scales he has memorized and banging out a few chords progressions he may or may not have thought of. Everything gets terribly derivative for him. He recognizes that a chord progression is the same in two songs he loves. "Harmony in My Head" is the same as "Champs." Every song he hears in his head is actually another song. what sets them apart, all songs from one another, is the lyrics or the fancy musical stuff put over the bare bones. Well, the musical stuff hasn't come yet and it's progress is dubious. The lyrics are his in to the music business. Yeah, a rock star, yeah, a hardcore punk guy, yeah, a genius like D. Boon, his idol.

He's smart enough to write right? Where does intelligence siphon into creativity? No one taught him that and no one will. If the public school system was ever lacking, it was in the department of not telling kids: "Here's where we stop helping." No matter how gradually kids are weened off the tit of book-learning, the realization will always hit like an atom bomb developed for use in WWII, Nagasaki, Japan, death, dying, sadness. Every kid hears it in high school that tests won't mean anything in the real world, but they matter right now. Grades will not exist in the workplace outside of employer evaluations, which will come down to the existence of a workplace for the employee. How can he benefit from having good grades? It's not hard for him, nothing challenges him in the physical process of getting good grades. He realizes that his priorities are not thought about in a realm outside of school, but rather that he, in fact, has no priorities. School is a bodily function. It is a routine that he fulfills like the smoker who reaches for packs of cigarettes instinctively. Without school where will he end up? Well that's what college is for. College will solve all his problems.

His sister, his father, his mother, and anyone else he knows who knows about it figured out somewhat what they want to do with their lives for the limbo after college. There is an intense apprehension about self-discovery. The most freeing sensations are always the scariest. Understanding where his basic wants, hopes, dreams fall in the chasm of his personality scares him so much he considers giving in an becoming an engineer as his family, math aptitude, and comfort-drunk attitude beg of him. An engineer is a fine job, he knows, but it doesn't interest him. The desire to learn is defined not by it's converse as happiness is. The desire to do something, to be involved, is more than, is above, is beyond, those simplistic impulses of happiness or love. The ubiquitous examples of those corrupted by the education system that get funneled into careers they know everything about and derive no pleasure or intrigue from are there for him to see. He does not want to be like them.

So he sits in his basement and thinks. About things. About life, existence, religion, philosophy, and he stares at the computer screen and he learns chords and he plays songs and he laughs at his mother's silly sense of humor and he feels wasted. He thought he would be more than this. Everyone tells him he is and he tells himself he is too, but if pain is like a gas, then self-pity is like mercury. He allows every form of self-esteem to be corrupted by the bacteria of his own hatred for himself and no amount of positive feedback can make him forget the ennui of stupidity he blurts out. Metacognition is his shovel and he digs his hole farther down into the depths of inactivity. He is afraid to fail and afraid to succeed because no matter how either comes, it will never feel right.

Titles are overrated

Hate flows through me live a white water river and my thoughts are agitatedly complaining about getting wet. A thorough and building anger has been rising in me for some time. I don't feel it building towards anything. My mind is an empty lot waiting to be filled. My dreams are renters promising a long term commitment but nothing can occupy this space for very long. I'm waiting for that swanky cafe to come in and attract just the right kind of people.
I'm not a good allegory for anything, not a symbol, not a metaphor. My thoughts are allusions to those thoughts regurgitated to me. The cycle continues. The original thinkers had the only truth and it was simple. Evolutionary desire to expand and expound has created differences. Human being hate each other for the system we perpetuate by trying. Effort to differentiate breeds contempt because we seek the path of least resistance be it race, creed, or religion. The religious schisms make me laugh because if any of these people knew their own message as well as those who wrote it did, and what brilliant writers they were, then the similarities would manifest themselves in an epiphany of clarity. No religion that survives truly preaches hate. People preach hate through preaching difference.
Assimilation is not possible now because we have decided as a race to avoid accepting everyone as is. Somewhere along the course of history the executive decision to perpetuate the denial of obvious truths about similarities between all people was made.
And yet I am filled with rage. In stories, movies, etc. this anger comes out in some form or another. I'm waiting.
The rising tide, the overflowing dam, the busting pipes, the tipping canoe, the capsized boat, the sunken oar, the feared great deep, the stream empties into the gulf and the gulf empties into the ocean and the ocean is all one being with nothingness in between. Is there a metaphor to be found? The fish don't know and neither do I.
There is a fear beyond the unknown like a sick game show that forces choices that only lead to more choices and the house always wins. That fear is the non-resolution of the unknown. It is because of this fear that we don't think we just expect. We don't reason, we just search and when we can't search, we give up, and when we realize that we've given up we search again only to find that there was nothing to be found. Some times we find a small prize. Some times a contestant wins a good amount of cash. But very few win the million. Those lucky few. Who are they? Where are the happy people who have solved it, life's material concerns. Are they happier than me? Is that not a greater fear, relative happiness? Happiness is only real when shared because what we really want is euphoria. Euphoria is escape and escape has driven the two biggest science projects of civilization: the plane and space exploration. We don't want to know what's out there, we want to go out there. Happiness is defined in sadness, black in white, and escape in hate of stagnation. I'm a stagnant puddle and no one is going to throw a stone in me to cause a ripple. I can ripple myself, but perhaps if I look further into the pond, I'll see the bottom, clear as Walden pond.

Double Nickels

I have been listening to a podcast about Double Nickels on the Dime and I thought I'd write about why it's my favorite album and one of the most formative pieces of art I been exposed to.


I think that any change in a person comes from something being awakened in them and more often than not people need this to be done to them, shaken awake. Punk rock changed my life, changed how I thought, changed how I felt about my angst. Angst is the most popular buzzword of punk rock and it is the jumping off point for any punk rocker. Angst is the beginning of a process, a growing up process. It  evolves into plain old anger and when that anger is pointed a boy becomes a man. I became a man when I heard Double Nickels.
It was the summer going into my sophomore year of high school and I can't even remember what swill I listened to, but it wasn't much of anything. I think it was mainly Arcade Fire and TV on the Radio and I loved them and some of that has stuck through, but I no longer call that poetry. Pop is too easy and cleanliness is not godliness when it comes to music. I can dig easy listening and I can dig simple beauty and it's good in small doses, like a friend you share a few things with, like friends from your high school football team. They'll never be your best friends, but they have value. Punk is your best friend, your lover, your friend that you can talk to because he talks to you.
My sister gave me a CD of hardcore punk bands and this was spurred by my telling her how much I loved Dinosaur Jr's "You're Living All Over Me" She told me a little bit about each band on the CD and gave me a book about some of the bands. Black Flag, Minor Threat, Negative Approach, Descendents, and a few others that were less important to me upon listening. One band I had an immediate prejudice against was the Minutemen because I had one album of theirs and it was 40 some songs. That was just plain intimidating. I remember the day I sat down and made myself listen to at least half of it. I ended up listening to all of it.
I had already listened to Minor Threat and Black Flag and loved it. The raw aggression spoke to me because I was a fucking teenager hating the fucking world because fuck everything. I still love this music because now it passes my Minutemen test. The Minutemen were artists and punk rockers. They are all my favorite musicians now and D. and Mike are the best songwriters I've ever listened to.
I read the one chapter in the book my sister gave me about the Minutemen (the book was "Our Band Could Be Your Life"). I learned that all the men in the band were history buffs, argued about everything, and were philosophers in the most real-world sense of the word. They were the man I wanted to be, wished I was. Reading on, I learned that they felt like I did about the world: that it was unfair, confusing, and that hope was dubious at best. They made something out of themselves, so maybe I could to. They were poets that put their thoughts to music, which is the beauty of any writing.
The Minutemen became my measuring stick for punk music. It has to be artistic, it has to be musical, it has to be true.
When I stopped listening to Double Nickels for the first time I had to go talk to my sister.
"It's completely different, Em. It's not like anything else on the CD. It's my favorite."
We just sat there saying the only thing you can say when love is shared: "Yeah man I know." Poets can describe this love and poets can make you feel this love. The Minutemen didn't write about love, but they helped me understand it. Punk rock changed my life for the better and made me see that it's okay to hate the world, but if you're not more than that then you're a childish angst-filled boy. I feel like a man when I listen to Double Nickels, but I'm filled with boyish excitement.
"The people will survive. In their environment." The environment may suck, hell it always will, but we'll survive. The Minutemen help me survive.

Marines vs. Nature Conservancy

No one really enjoys seeing the green peace or Save the Whales people on the sidewalk. It's not fun to get stopped by them, but it's their job and unfortunately their job entails a fair amount of pestering. I learned from my mom how to deal with them in the most polite way possible. If I have time to talk to them and they remain polite and amiable then I will give them my attention. The same rule applies with telemarketers and my mother's politeness has been tested at great lengths by these impatient sharks. Having worked as a telemarketer for a short time, my mom can empathize with these short-pitch salespeople.
Today I was walking through Lincoln Square and an agent from the Nature Conservancy talked to me. I'd never heard of this group, but their name was rather explanatory.
"Can I talk to you about saving the environment?" said the very cold, very cheery representative.
I had time, I'm just walking around on a Saturday, which makes me realize how much thought these people put into when and where they pitch to the public, so I am further inclined to listen to this person's spiel. I almost never give to these organizations because I don't have money to throw at these problems, but, following my mother's example, I listen to them.
"I appreciate what you guys do, but I just can't contribute right now, but you're definitely a cause I support and I'll help when I can; I'm sorry." Every time I say this I genuinely feel bad that I can't contribute, but at least I listened.
I went into a book store and got a couple books I was looking for. The old man that runs the cozy little place is beginning to show his age. In what may be a morbid thought, I imagine him dying in the store after an avalanche of books cover him. If he has to die, I hope he can become one with his store and his books.
Walking back the way I came, on the other side of the street now, I see another agent for the Nature Conservancy. I don't want to tell him that I already denied someone else, but I would have if he talked to me. Preparing myself for another round of charity guilt, I see a man angrily, busily, waving off the Nature Conservancy.
"No, no, join the marines." The man said as he scowled away. I was thoroughly confused. Join the marines? The agent of the Conservancy looked just as confused as me as he slowly turned to the man whose shoulders were hunched over with years of marine advocacy.
I doubt I will ever understand the man's logic behind his suggestion to the agent. "No I don't give a damn about the environment and neither should you. I'll tell you what you should care about: the marines. Enroll now!" I may have been witness to a sort of turf war between pitchmen.
This man must have been thinking at that moment that the marines had a serious problem in volunteers. He would have ordered the next big man he saw to do the same. The conservancy guy was a big man and the marine man was frustrated that the world was allowing such natural fighting talent to go to waste. Perhaps this thinking prompted his anger.
What confused me the most was that this was not a suggestion that solved the problem that the conservancy wanted to combat. He didn't say "No, no, go plant a tree." or "Go recycle something." or any variation of a backhanded "What are you REALLY helping?"
The world is just too angry right now. Too ready to snap, we never listen. I guess that's why the Marines might be an answer; they have missions and they exist in a structured environment where anger can help. I don't look down on the Marines, but this anger at the surface, anger at the world, must stop. The Marines can coexist with the Nature Conservancy.